Your brand delivers something important for your consumers. If it didn’t, they wouldn’t buy it.
Most brand owners recognise that the important thing that their brand delivers is not what it does – clean surfaces, quench thirst, feed a family – it is the feeling that that it evokes within the consumer. The emotions that result from having a clean kitchen, a quenched thirst or from knowing that you have delivered a great meal that everyone has enjoyed.
Most brands focus their communications upon these emotions. Advertising shows the happy consumer in their shiny kitchen, the feeling of a quenched thirst and the happy loving family around the dinner table.
However, it seems to me that product development nearly always focuses upon improving product delivery, rather than on improving the consumers’ emotional responses.
The two are, of course, related, but they are not the same…
You can continue to make incremental changes to improve your product delivery in the hope that consumers will notice and that they will like your product more as a result.
Or you can address the emotional response to their product experience more directly.
This may result in a very different way to approach the end result. It may lead your brand down a different product development route that leaves your competitors confused as to why you are taking more of their share.
Take a step back from what your product actually does and focus upon the set of emotions that you wish to deliver to your consumer.
Instead of thinking about how to clean the surface better, or how to make your drink even more thirst quenching, focus upon how those results make your consumer feel, not just at the end of the experience but examine the specific emotional reactions at every stage of the encounter. Don’t assume you know this, get out and find out.
Once you understand the emotional delivery that you are seeking to achieve, find other products, other experiences that deliver the same or similar emotions. I don’t mean competitive products that do the same thing as yours, I mean something completely different.
If your product delivers refreshment, find other experiences that also refresh – a cup of tea, a cold swim on a hot day. If your product delivers indulgence look at confectionary and also at other indulgent experiences such as a day at the spa.
The sensorial experience may be very different from your product but look at the emotional journey the consumer travels on their way to the end goal.
Very different sensorial experiences can deliver the same emotional responses. This will give you a very different view of what it is you are trying to deliver with your product and a completely different range of options for ways by which you can deliver it.
While it is always important that your product does do what it is supposed to, when you take a step back from just perfecting that delivery and think more about how to deliver the consumers’ desired emotional response, you will start to see different ways in which you can take your consumers along on their emotional journey towards greater satisfaction with, and love for, your brand.
Chris Lukehurst is a Consumer Psychologist and a Director at The Marketing Clinic:
Providing Clarity on the Psychological relationships between consumers and brands
